Todd Akin Campaign Features Rape Victim In Ad Targeting Women

With a heap of new campaign cash from the Republican Party, Republican Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin's (Mo.) campaign released a new ad on Thursday featuring a rape survivor who says she had an abortion.

"The reasons I'm voting for Todd and that I'm so proud of him is because he defends the unborn," says the survivor, a single mother and full-time student who identifies herself as "Kelly." "He's a kind man, a compassionate man, he has so much integrity."

While the woman does not elaborate on her own situation, the ad is clearly meant to show that some rape victims support Akin, even in light of his controversial comment in August that victims of "legitimate rape" don't need the option of abortion because they "rarely" become pregnant. While Republicans initially distanced themselves from Akin and demanded that he leave the race, the party has since decided to stand by him and has funneled $700,000 into his campaign.

Akin has made a big push for the support of conservative female voters in the months since the controversy, which included launching a "Women for Akin" bus tour with Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative activist largely known for her anti-feminist work. Akin's new ad, in addition to featuring a rape victim, features a young female emigrant from Russia.

"I know Congressman Todd Akin knows what government's job is, that is to protect life, not to control life like they did in Russia," she said in the ad. "The reason why I'm supporting Todd Akin is because I love this nation. I love my freedoms. I don't want to lose my freedoms."

Watch the video above.

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Eric Fehrnstrom, senior campaign adviser for Mitt Romney, said on Sunday that issues pertaining to women's reproductive rights, such as abortion and birth control, were "shiny objects" meant to distract voters from the real issues.
"Mitt Romney is pro-life," he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "He'll govern as a pro-life president, but you're going to see the Democrats use all sorts of shiny objects to distract people's attention from the Obama performance on the economy. This is not a social issue election."

The Senate will vote Thursday on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would expand and strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and make it illegal for employers to punish women for bringing up pay disparity issues.
Dana Perino, a Fox News contributor and former press secretary for President George W. Bush, called the equal pay issue "a distraction" from the country's real financial problems last week.
"Well, it's just yet another distraction of dealing with the major financial issues that the country should be dealing with," Perino said. "This is not a job creator."

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whose home state's legislature recently defunded Planned Parenthood and voted to pass a bill that would allow employers to deny women birth control coverage, delivered a floor speech in which he insisted that the war on women is something imaginary for Democrats to "sputter about."
"My friends, this supposed 'War on Women' or the use of similarly outlandish rhetoric by partisan operatives has two purposes, and both are purely political in their purpose and effect: The first is to distract citizens from real issues that really matter and the second is to give talking heads something to sputter about when they appear on cable television," he said.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus tried to trivialize concerns about the legislative "war on women" by comparing it to a "war on caterpillars."
"If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we'd have problems with caterpillars," Priebus said in an April interview on Bloomberg Television. "It's a fiction."

Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Sarah Steelman (R) took heat from her opponents in May when she contended that Democratic lawmakers' focus on the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act was "a distraction" from the issues they should be dealing with instead.
"I think it's unfortunate that the Democrats have made a political football out of this thing, which I think is what they keep doing to distract from real problems that are facing our nation," she said in an interview with St. Louis Public Radio.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) defended the Republican Party in April for going after insurance coverage for contraception by arguing that women don't actually care about contraception.
"Women don't care about contraception," she said on ABC's The View. "They care about jobs and the economy and raising their families and all those other things."